Friday, August 29, 2008

There Once Was a Farmer From Leeds by Anonymous

There once was a farmer from Leeds,Who ate up six packets of seeds,It soon came to pass,He was covered with grass,And he couldn't sit down for the weeds!--Anonymous

I know this picture isn't of weeds, those are down at the bottom of the post. This is just a cute naked baby picture of Elizabeth.

Okay time for another newsy post. Elizabeth is doing well. She has two teeth, and more may be on the way (She certainly acts like her mouth hurts). It's hard to get a photo of them because every time I get the camera close enough to her open mouth, she tries to eat it.

A week or so ago, I posted some video of Elizabeth almost and just barely learning to crawl. Well, now she's an old pro, and her world has become much bigger all of a sudden. It only took a day or so of that mixture of creeping on her belly and standing on her tiptoes to be replaced with real hands-and-knees crawling. It's like once she felt the forward motion, her brain said, "Oh! so THAT'S how it works!" and she was off. When she has somewhere to go, she does it efficiently -- but when she's just browsing her toys, she still does the kneeling/tiptoe thing and kind of makes her way around the room by doing a series of turns.

She seems to have gotten a lot more clever since she started crawling -- though maybe it's just that she couldn't reach the things she wanted to play with. Take, for instance, the springs on the backs of the doors that keep the doorknobs from punching holes in the wall. She crawled over to the one in her bedroom, and grabbed for it, and was delighted when it sprang back with a twang. Now, she will sit and twang it over and over, and find the springs on the back of other doors too. She wanted to know what was in her closet, so she made her way over, and pushed the door open to peek around the edge. She really likes peeking around the edges of things -- especially when her Daddy's around. She likes to watch from her bedroom as he makes breakfast in the kitchen, and she genuinely lights up when he comes home from work. Here's a video of her initiating a game of peekaboo with him, then crawling over to him at the end. It's fun for me to see how Peter reacts to this sort of thing. He's pleased as punch and is so proud of his little girl, he's about to burst.

Another clever thing she does is figure out what game I'm playing. In this clip, she will wait for me to build a block tower, then reach out and knock it over, and ignore the blocks till I build another. She's not really interested in the blocks as blocks, but she likes interacting with me while I play the game. She seems to want to be with me a lot more now that she's crawling too -- though again, it may be that she's just able to act on those urges. She'll happily crawl around the room playing with toys, then crawl over onto my lap. I'll pick her up and give her a hug, then set her down in my lap and she crawls off again. It's like she just has to tag home base every so often. It makes me feel special to know that I'm home base and I make her feel safe.

Because Elizabeth likes watching the birds at Grandma's house, I thought I'd give her a treat at the park on Friday. The pigeons there know what lunch looks like, and so when the bigger kids finish eating their crackers, they all fly down to pick up the crumbs. When that happened, I put Elizabeth on the ground, and dropped as crushed cracker in front of her. Fifty or so birds all came to fight over it -- not intimidated at all by something as small as a baby. Here's a video of Elizabeth excitedly trying to catch a pigeon. Amazingly, she did catch one eventually by coming up from behind and grabbing his wings and tail. Even more amazingly, I happened to take a photo just then!

Well, I've gotta go. I hired a Realtor at last, and one day after she listed our house on the MLS, there are TWO other Realtors who want to show it to their clients!! This is GOOD NEWS! I need to finish the landscaping in the back yard this morning though, so I'd better go do that. There's more pictures on Picasa, and there may be a bonus video over at my youtube site. Okay, I'm back. We spent all morning getting everything all ready and just perfect, and nobody showed up. The Realtor even called and confirmed yesterday that they were coming today between 2:30 and 3:00. It's hard work living at this extreme pitch of cleanliness, and I don't think it's fair to make me get the house all perfect (including shining the faucets with Windex and lighting a scented oil candle to make the house smell inviting) and then not show up.

On the positive side, I did get the landscaping in the back done. I dug up all the gravel, pulled out the grass and as many of the horrible roots as I could find, transplanted the Jasmine, added Zinnias and some Dollar Store bulbs (that may come up as a pleasant surprise one day), and covered the dirt with some bark chips to dissuade the cats from pooping there. I also recently lengthened and straightened the flagstone and gravel path. The whole area really looks a lot nicer than it did when I started. Here are some before and after pictures.

Before Side Yard -- Nov 2007After Side Yard -- Nice straight path, plenty of gravel, no weeds or grass on my side.Before(ish) Back Yard-- Notice the gravel, horrible grass and weeds just past the point where I stopped.After Back Yard -- Pretty zinnias and jasmine with nice red bark on top.

Thanks for your posts. You are always very honest about your experiences--the good and the bad. It's fun to see how your baby is growing, and to remember some of my new mom feelings. I had never thought of being the "home base" for my kids, but that's exactly how do describe it. It is nice, isn't it?

Love your posts. The peekaboo and the pigeons are priceless. That idea about being home base for Elizabeth. I hadn't thought of that either, but that's really true. As she gets older you will find that there will be times when she'll just want to "touch base" with you for a few minutes, and then be off doing her own thing.

And for those days when she doesn't seem to know what to do with herself, if she just spends a few minutes with you first, she more than likely will then get inspirations to go do some things on her own.